Juanita’s birthday

She had been 86’ed in the other place, so she had her 80th birthday bash in the bar at the corner. Not just a bar, the only bar in town. To some their second home, to others an occasional waterhole if life gets to them. Drunks and doped up losers is what they call the people there. I call them pure, real, and if you are real life can get too hard, and you may try to avoid what is hurtful, fleeing the judgment of others. Good real people, beautiful in their generosity of well wishing, in their acceptance of who anybody is. These people will be missed when the other continent is my home again. With them I am thrown in the balance of life. Tonight was a lighthearted and caring bath in humanity. 140 $, a lot for an old lady, did she spend to spread the joy of being alive and marking the day the light shone on her for the first time. She is fiery, proud, fiercely independent and packs a pistol… The musicians played for free, for her, for all of us. Amusement and distraction is at a premium in the summer heat. We are all sweaty, sticky; yet hug. How else to lessen the distance between people? And tonight was not a night for distance, it was a celebration of life, whatever life brings. To our futures!
I cannot but think of a line by Theodore Roethke: What’s madness but nobility of the soul at odds with circumstance?